Just last month, Yahoo revealed that 500 million accounts had been compromised in a massive data breach. Last year, 157,000 Talk Talk customers had their personal details hacked in a cyber attack on the company.
I could go on: finding examples of data breaches at major corporations involves little in the way of detective work.
So it can come as little surprise that increased security threat from cyber and data privacy breaches is the number one risk on the minds of executives in the road, rail and logistics sectors.
In fact, a study by Willis Towers Watson found that increased security threat from cyber and data privacy breaches was highlighted by 44 per cent of C-suite executives, ahead of increased complexity of regulation, and third party security vulnerabilities.
WTW’s Transport Risk Index report points out that if a company is technologically vulnerable, a cyber attack will magnify that. And cyber risks multiply for each partner taken on, for every alliance struck and for each link in the digital supply chain.
For many organisations, a key element in the business strategy is to forge stronger supply chain partnerships which inevitably involves sharing more and more data.
And data security can be particularly challenging as supply chains become increasingly extended. Not only that, there is no such thing as a definitive solution – the tactics adopted by hackers are constantly changing.
When a company has a supply chain problem, there is a good chance that the problem originated in a part of the supply chain over which it had no visibility.
As supply chains become more complex and involve greater levels of information sharing, there will need to be increasingly sophisticated solutions for ensuring data security.
